Hydrogen has been considered as a clean and promising candidate for use as a fuel source alternative to conventional fuel sources, such as petroleum. Hydrogen can be obtained from renewable sources, such as water and biomass, through thermal or catalytic processes. Developing these processes for extracting hydrogen will allow the utilization of a diverse set of domestic resources to more fully address our energy needs. Further, using hydrogen as a fuel source will enable the reduction of our energy dependence on fossil fuel, allow us to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and help ensure a stable and sustainable energy supply.
Typically, hydrogen is produced from bio-ethanol through catalytic steam reforming (SR), a process which may be employed to provide hydrogen to fuel cell systems. However, SR is still limited in application since it is a highly endothermic process and is hampered by the lack of long-term stable and coke resistant catalysts. Auto-thermal reforming of ethanol (ATRE) is an alternative process for generating hydrogen and is characterized by a relatively reduced rate of carbon deposition and a more energetically favorable thermal equilibrium, which can be varied as a function of the oxygen feed. A relatively high yield of hydrogen can be achieved using noble metal based catalysts, but the high cost of noble metals imposes economical and large-scale limit to the practical applications of ATRE. Alternately, non-precious metal-based catalysts show a relatively high catalytic performance but only at elevated operating temperatures. For example, nickel based catalysts are inexpensive and fairly plentiful, but give an unacceptably low hydrogen yield at low temperatures. Further, the known catalysts tend to suffer from catalyst deactivation due to sintering and carbon deposition on the catalyst surface. Thus, there remains a need for inexpensive and plentiful catalyst compositions that are capable of generating substantial hydrogen yields at relatively low temperatures. The present novel technology addresses this need.